Formula One news 2023: Lewis Hamilton says sport must do better to combat uneven playing field
Lewis Hamilton has backed his Mercedes team principal, saying that the sport must do better to combat the uneven playing field of F1.
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Seven-time Formula One world champion Lewis Hamilton says the sport must “do better” to create tighter competition amid fears that Red Bull’s domination could result in boredom.
Red Bull’s Max Verstappen, winner of the past two championships, leads the driver’s standings after splitting the opening four races of the season with teammate Sergio Perez.
Arriving for Sunday’s Miami Grand Prix, drivers spoke openly about how far ahead Red Bull’s cars were of the rest of the field with Ferrari.
Hamilton was asked on Wednesday if there was a danger of American fans losing interest in Formula One given the total domination of one team and the Mercedes driver said while he still found excitement, he understood the concerns.
“It’s not boring for me,” he said. “I’m challenged every single day trying to get back to the front. So, it’s definitely not boring from my perspective. But as a racing fan watching, I can understand.
“Because there’s not as much competition as they’re perhaps used to with NFL and with NBA at the moment. That’s not my doing. I mean, we need to do better, I think, as a sport.
“They have already tried to bring the teams closer, but it never seems to work. All I can say is that we’re working as hard as we can to close it up and get back to that. Give them some more excitement.”
In three of the four races this season, Red Bull have taken the top two places on the podium, with Hamilton’s second place in Australia the only exception.
Hamilton’s Mercedes teammate George Russell suggested that fans might want to focus not on the race for the winner but on the contest between the best of the rest.
“I think the competition we’ve got at the moment with Ferrari and Aston Martin, every race we go to is really close between us in qualifying and the pace is really close in the race,” he said.
“If that was a fight for the victory, it would probably be one of the most exciting seasons we have seen in a long, long time and it is obviously just a shame that there’s two more cars well out in front So, forget about those two and just watch from (position) P3, it may be a bit more exciting.”
But Russell conceded the problem was real and a difficult one for Formula One to deal with.
“It is challenging,” Russell said.
“In no sport do you want to see somebody dominate and you want to have competition and that’s what we all want in an ideal world. You have 20 drivers and 10 teams all capable of winning every single race if you do the right job.”
F1’s new technical rules brought in last season are being blamed by some for the lack of entertainment but Aston Martin’s Fernando Alonso said they needed to be given more time.
The rules were designed to create a closer field and encourage overtaking but while there is little sign of either happening, the Spanish two-times world champion said patience was required.
“If Red Bull were not so far ahead, it is a very interesting fight with three or four teams within 0.1-0.2secs and maybe then we would be saying the rules were a success,” he said.
Heavyweight’s desperate plea to fix ‘boring’ F1
— Callum Dick
Mercedes boss Toto Wolff says Formula One has become “boring” and urged the powers that be to “shake that up somehow”.
His comments come after Sergio Perez and Max Verstappen streaked away on the streets of Baku to claim yet another Red Bull one-two finish, with Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc languishing almost 20 seconds behind.
Perez and Verstappen have shared the four race victories so far this season and with each passing Grand Prix it feels like a case of if and not when another team contends for the chequered flag.
But Wolff is also concerned with the racing standard further down the grid order.
“It was not a thriller. No overtaking, even with a big pace difference, made it not great entertainment … we need to look at how we can avoid a boring race,” Wolff said of the Azerbaijan Grand Prix.
“We see a pattern. There are two Red Bulls and then there are six cars, and a long way off is the third division (of teams). That has been the pattern the first four races and we have to shake that up somehow.”
Didn’t hear much pleading when Rosberg won the utter snoozefest in 2016…..? https://t.co/htPKLZP0m5
— Karun Chandhok (@karunchandhok) May 2, 2023
Wolff oversaw arguably the most dominant period from a single team in F1 history, when Mercedes won eight-straight Constructors’ Championships between 2014 and 2021 and seven consecutive Drivers’ Championships (2014-2020).
But the Austrian’s comments about avoiding “a boring race” ring true – at least when it comes to overtakes.
Last weekend there were only 23 total overtakes, down from 62 in 2019 and 80 in 2016 at the same Baku street circuit.
Fernando Alonso’s early pass on Carlos Sainz aside, there was little-to-no on-track action to get fans excited.
Instead it was a familiar sight of cars lapping in the same order for much of the race; McLaren’s Aussie rookie Oscar Piastri one of the drivers falling foul to what many like to term the “DRS train”.
Two-time reigning champion Verstappen believes a big reason for the lack of overtakes is that the cars are simply “too heavy”.
Modern F1 cars are longer and wider than ever before and from 2021 to 2022, the minimum weight limit rose from 752kg to 798kg making them the heaviest in the sport’s history.
“I think the more downforce we generate – and that, of course, will always be every year – if you keep the rules the same it will be harder to pass,” Verstappen explained.
“And I think also, because of the weight of the cars nowadays … in the low speed it’s a bit harder to follow because as soon as you have a tiny moment with that weight, it becomes a bigger slide, it’s harder on the tyres so you overheat the tyres more.”
Formula One installed a cost cap from last season as an equalising measure to stop the richer teams from simply out-engineering rivals through sheer spending.
But Red Bull began the era with a clear design advantage and has extended that into 2023 – so much so that rivals conceded the title race was over after just the second race of the season.
F1 DESIGN MASTERMIND RE-SIGNS WITH RED BULL
Red Bull has staved off major rival interest to re-sign the mastermind behind each of its Formula One championship-winning cars.
Design chief Adrian Newey has penned a new deal with the team according to Red Bull adviser Helmut Marko, keeping F1’s most in-demand technical guru at Milton Keynes.
“The extension of the contract with Adrian Newey shows that we are continuing to build on continuity and that we have an extremely pleasant working atmosphere,” Marko told German outlet Auto Bild.
“Adrian has been with us for 17 years and although it is not a lifetime contract, he has always had and will continue to get attractive offers from the competition – I hope and am sure that he will retire with us.”
Newey joined Red Bull from McLaren in 2005 and has led the design of each of the team’s championship-winning cars since then.
He designed the RB6 which Sebastian Vettel drove to secure the team’s maiden Drivers’ Championship in 2010 and further three world championships from 2011-14.
The Englishman’s technical nous helped deliver Max Verstappen a car capable of finally ending Mercedes’ long-running rein when the Dutchman outdueled Lewis Hamilton to win the 2021 Drivers’ Championship, albeit in controversial circumstances.
And Newey was the brain behind the dominant RB19 that Verstappen and Sergio Perez have piloted to a perfect cleansweep of Grand Prix victories so far this season.
In total he has delivered six Drivers’ Championships and five Constructor’s Championships to Red Bull, with more likely to come this year.
His almost unmatched mastery of ground effect aerodynamics made the 64-year-old a highly sought-after commodity within the F1 paddock.
But Red Bull has shut the door on rival interest and kept the master car maker at Milton Keynes for the foreseeable future.
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